Rome’s One Legged Stool (12)

In the interests of a sermon I am preaching on the authority and sufficiency of Scripture, I went looking about on the internet for some of the common objections to the claims my sermon makes. I found a very interesting link titledTwenty One Reasons to Reject Sola Scriptura. The article by catholic apologist Joel Peters presented much of what I have heard in the past, but also did present some new and very challenging information. It is my goal in a long series of blog posts to briefly respond to each of these brief arguments.

Sola Ecclesia

I would like to begin with #12 in the link which states,

“The Belief that Scripture is ‘Self-Authenticating’ Does Not Hold Up under Examination.”

This is where the debate needs to begin. This is the worldview assumption: this is getting at the Ultimate Authority of both sides.

Although Peters doesn’t claim this, the Ultimate Authority for the Romans Catholic is the church. They claim they have a tripartite system of authority (Scripture, Tradition, and the Church Magisterium). The claim is that authority functions like a 3-legged stool. No leg is more important, but each is necessary.

But functionally, this is not the case for Rome. Catholics claim that the Scriptures are an ultimate authority for people, but they claim that the church is an equal authority, since after all, the church had to give us the Scripture, and it has to interpret it for us as well. Allegedly, without the Church we would have no Bible, and we can’t know what the Bible says. We need the church as a necessary starting point before we can move forward to the Bible/Tradition.

In spite of their claims to the contrary, as an epistemic axiom, the church is the final authority for the Catholic. The formation/development of Tradition/the Scriptures are enslaved to the authority of the church, and the understanding/interpretation of those things are also funneled through the Church. We will call this: Sola Ecclesia.

Necessary Circles

Here is the problem: everyone has to have an ultimate starting point; everyone has an ultimate authority, and those must be circular. You cannot appeal to something outside of your ultimate authority in order to justify your ultimate authority, because whatever you appealed to would then be a higher authority over whatever it is you are trying to validate.

Let’s put this in laymen’s terms shall we? If I say my Mom is my highest authority, and someone asks me, “Why?” and I responded with, “Because my dad told me so,” that would make my dad my highest authority, regardless of my claim otherwise. Therefore, all ultimate standards must be circular in some way when validating their own authority, like using your speed to prove your faster than others.

Even the non-religious are philosophically stuck with this necessary circle. For example, if someone appeals to no external religious authority (Church, Bible, Quran, Book of Mormon, Prophet, etc.) they ultimately determine truth by appealing to their reasoning process. Their cognitive faculties serve as their final court of appeal.

Suppose that person was asked how they would validate the reliability or authority of their reasoning process? They would have to reason about the question, and then provide a reason for it. They would have to use their reasoning to justify the use of their reasoning.

My Circle is Better than Yours

Not all circles are created equal. Too much could be said on that, but the simple point is this, only one ultimate authority is actually valid and true, and thus that ultimate authority would be self-authenticating, while the others would simply be circular and fallacious.

The Roman Catholic and the Christian are at an advantage as they both believe in a God who can reveal things and authenticate to His creatures His own truths. The problem is the Catholic’s ultimate standard has cut off the branch it is sitting on.

Never once is the issue of how the author knows the Church to be infallible and authoritative addressed within the post. However, given his starting point, he could not give any justification for that.

He could not consistently appeal to the Bible for this validation because, by his own admission, he needs the Church prior to a reading of the Bible in order to properly interpret it, as well as consider it reliable and completed. The same goes for validating his Tradition.

Thus, he needs to authenticate the Church apart from Scripture or Tradition. This leaves him with two options:

1) The Church is self-authenticating

or

2) A historical look at the development of the Roman Catholic Church validates its authority.

Number two cannot be consistently relied on, for how does one study history? They must read books. Yet, the Catholic claim is that protestants cannot know what the Bible says without the Church, and the Bible is God’s Word! If God’s Word cannot be known without the church, certainly books that are fallible, written without inspiration, cannot be known or understood without the interpretation of the Church. Yet again, the Church must be presupposed prior to any possible historical study.

This leaves one option for the Catholic: the circular claim that the Church is self-authenticating. There are many problems with this, the first one is, in order to be self-authenticating it must be God’s Word, yet the Bible is just that. On what basis could the Catholic claim that the church is self-authenticating because it is God’s infallible Church, but the Bible, which is God’s infallible Word, can’t be self-authenticating?

Underneath this 3-legged stool, upon further examination, is a stool with only leg.

Special Pleading

Underneath the claim in the article, Peters gives a number of standards for the self-authentication of Scripture that his own criteria doesn’t meet. First he argues,

“If Scripture were actually ‘self-authenticating,’ why was there so much disagreement and uncertainty over these various books? Why was there any disagreement at all?”

The first problem with this is the assumption being smuggled in. The assumption is a particular definition of “self-authentication” that Bible would not agree with. The standard here is that in order for the Scriptures to be considered self-authenticating, there must have been an immediate and unanimous agreement among people. Where does he get this standard from? Where does he get this expectationi from in the first place?

In Dr. Michael Kruger’s book, The Canon Revisited, he says notes this very thing when dealing with these objections. He says,

“The reason [this] canonical defeater…has persuasive appeal is that they have quietly slipped a foundational assumption into the debate, namely, that the existence of diversity and disagreement is contrary to what we expect if these twenty-seven books are really given by God.”

4) Not all groups who claim to be the “church” are really part of it. (Kruger, 198-199)

I find the last one to be the most significant. By what standard does Peters get to determine whom among the dissenters of particular books are the “sheep” that “hear [Jesus’] voice?” In other words, there are millions of protestants who do not accept the authority of the Roman Catholic church, yet, protestants claim to follow Christ. Therefore, the Roman Catholic church cannot be divinely inspired since millions of Christ-followers don’t recognize it.

Another problem also is that the Catholic Church has had many disagreements over how to think of itself as well. Modern Catholics today disagree over things like whether the Vatican II is inspired, when the Pope is speaking Ex-Cathedra, and many other issues related to Rome’s claims to authority. And if our author would simply reject them as being authentic Catholics, then we are back to the first issue addressed.

He complained that the Bible took multiple centuries to reach a “consensus.” Kruger again notes this presupposition is simply not necessary,

“[T]he most critical issue is that God chose to deliver His books to His church through normal historical channels. Given that [the New Testament was] not lowered down from heaven in final form, but written by a variety of different authors, in a variety of different time periods, and in a variety of different geographical locations, we can expect that there would be an inevitable delay between the time a book was was known and accepted in one portion of the empire as opposed to another. Such a delay would have eventually led to some disagreements and discussion over various books. If God chose to deliver His books in real time and history, then such a scenario would be inevitable and natural” (Kruger, 199).

Along with the charge that agreement didn’t happen sooner, what is the evidence that there was unanimous consensus around Peter’s Primacy in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd century?

Driving into a Ditch

In defense of this claim, Peters also states,

“Even more interesting is the fact that some books in the Bible do not identify their authors. The idea of self-authentication – if it were true – might be more plausible if each and every Biblical author identified himself, as we could more easily examine that author’s credentials, so to speak, or at least determine who it was that claimed to be speaking for God. But in this regard the Bible leaves us ignorant in a few instances. Take St. Matthew’s Gospel as one example; nowhere does the text indicate that it was Matthew, one of the twelve Apostles, who authored it. We are therefore left with only two possibilities for determining its authorship: 1) What Tradition has to say, 2) Biblical scholarship.”

This commits the fallacy of equivocation. Self-attestation and self-authentication are not the same thing. Jesus’ sheep can hear His voice in a message even if the messenger is not wearing a name tag (thanks to the power of the Shepherd, not the sheep).

He then concludes the following:

“In either case, the source of determination is an extra-Biblical source and would therefore fall under condemnation by the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.”

First of all, no it wouldn’t. That is a misunderstanding of the doctrine. However, here is the bigger problem. How would he authenticate the Church’s authority? Any answer other than “The Church says so” would be committing the same fallacy he is accusing the position of Sola Scriptura of committing when they appeal outside of Scripture to validate an author of Scripture. His argument proves too much.

Now, the counter-claim I made was anticipated,

“Now the Protestant may be saying at this point that it is unnecessary to know whether or not Matthew actually wrote this Gospel, as one’s salvation does not depend on knowing whether it was Matthew or someone else. But such a view presents quite a difficulty. What the Protestant is effectively saying is that while an authentic Gospel is God’s Word and is the means by which a person comes to a saving knowledge of Christ, the person has no way of knowing for certain in the case of Matthew’s Gospel whether it is Apostolic in origin and consequently has no way of knowing it if its genuine (i.e., God’s Word) or not. And if this Gospel’s authenticity is questionable, then why include it in the Bible? If its authenticity is certain, then how is this known in the absence of self-identification by Matthew?“

This is a question-begging epithet. His complaint is that without an infallible revelation of the author, we cannot examine the credentials and know a book is from God. Pick up Dr. Kruger’s book if you believe that.

This is forcing the self-authenticating model to be dependent solely on the historical, apostolic evidence, which is a denial of the definition of a self-authenticating model! He is forcing his presuppositions into the definition of a word that rejects those presuppositions.

A series of questions need to be asked of the author. Peters has established a criterion for biblical authentication: apostolic origins.

Question 1: Where did he get this criteria from? How does he know that this is what is needed for a New Testament book to be accepted?

Question 2: What is the external validation the church has to justify her own authority?

Question 3: Whatever external criteria Peters’ appeals to, why is it you can trust your fallible understanding of that criteria apart from the Church’s interpretive guiding, but the protestant can’t trust his fallible interpretation of Scripture apart from the church?

Question 4: If Peters appeals to internal criteria, rather than external, why does he require external criteria for the Scriptures?

Question 5: How could Peters consistently claim that the church is able to be validate her own authority, but the Bible, which is God’s perfect infallible Word, can’t?

It appears, the Catholic apologist has proven too much. To steal an analogy from Douglas Wilson, he has driven the protestant car into a ditch, but now no longer has a car of his own to drive.